Page 17 of Alien Devil’s Crown

Once, deep in the third hour, she stopped working. I followed her gaze.

Bronwen was braiding a strip of ribbon into Turnip’s bristles while Zarek held the boar’s attention with a protein cube. Lika watched them for several seconds with an expression I had not seen on her before: unguarded want, and not for anything on the table.

Then she noticed me looking and went back to the files. I looked at my own overlay and failed to concentrate for a while.

Brevan spent the last hour calibrating the voice filter in the collar I had fastened on Lika the night before. When she came back to the table, the black line at her throat turned every professional sentence I owned into a harder task. She caught me looking once.

“Filter acceptable?” she asked.

“Within tolerance.”

“Your tolerance appears strained.”

Brevan made a quiet choking sound over his slate. I moved to the next checkpoint without answering.

We broke at midnight, ship time, deep in the burn toward Kaddran. The pairs left together. Sabine pulled Varrick out mid-sentence. Anhara and Kallum were simply the first ones gone.

Lika gathered the personnel files, squared them, and left with a nod to the table in general and nothing to me in particular. Her guard fell in behind her. I watched until the hatch closed behind her.

Talon stayed. He does that.

“The plan’s good,” he said. “Better than good. Best we’ve ever built. Two days with her and we could see how to do it.” He let that stand. “You know what I’m going to say.”

“You’re going to say I’ve put a stranger at the center of everything.”

“No. You did that with my full agreement; her intel proved out and there’s no plan without her. I was going to say something else.” He stood, and at the hatch he paused, not unkindly.

“You watch her the way you watch the Spire schematic. Like a problem you can’t put down. Just know which one you’re solving.”

He left.

The honest sentence, and I only allowed it because the room was empty: I had never met anyone like her.

I pulled up the route overlay and worked until the night cycle dimmed the corridors because planning the Spire was easier than thinking about her.

LIKA

By the fourth night of the burn, cover rehearsals, credential checks and sleep stolen in shifts had swallowed the days. The route was settled. We spent the remaining time practicing what we would do if the building stopped cooperating.

At 0300 on day five I gave up on sleep and told myself it was the approach vectors.

The lie was thin even by my standards. The vectors were sound. I’d rebuilt them twice against the cabin ceiling. They held. I stayed awake anyway, in the first bed in years where the surveillance had at least been admitted out loud.

The guard outside my door had changed at midnight. The ship hummed with hard burn. Somewhere above my head, if the Penumbra had an above, was a war room, and I knew without checking that it wasn’t empty.

I got up and went to check anyway. For the vectors.

He was exactly where I’d left him, alone at the table. He didn’t startle when the hatch opened, because of course he’d heard me coming.

“Backup at the security-level-four transition,” he said instead, and turned the schematic. He didn’t ask why I was there. He gave me a problem to solve.

“You’ve moved it east.”

“Your caff logic. If security level six clusters at the alcove before relief, security four does something. I want to know what before it knows us.”

“Security four holds records staff, not garrison. What they do before relief is stop working forty minutes early while looking exactly like people working.” I pulled a chair into the display’s light and sat.

“Which is better for us than an empty floor. Clerks pretending to work don’t look up. You could march the delegation past a records pool at end of watch carrying the vault door on your shoulders.”